Insight of Reflection

Question

Reflection takes a snapshot of object state before serialization then use that snapshot in deserialization.   Anyway to look into that ?

Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan · Answer

Is that statement from MSDN, somewhere, or did an author make that statement? Let me skim it down a bit and explain the concept to you.

Reflection basically, is a feature of .NET framework (and many other similar frameworks such as Java) in which, you can look into the members of the objects, members include:

Functions
Properties

Using reflection, you can iterate over the collection of these items and elements that every object has. You can iterate over the collection of the functions and properties that each object has and then select if you want any of them or show a message that the object is not acceptable.

The statement can also mean that the framework helps the API developers to save the values of the objects, such as in the case of a serializer (such as JSON.NET), it helps them to get the values of the objects and then store them and proceed working with the objects as needed. Reflection has many other benefits such as finding extra attributes of the elements etc. If you need more overview, let me know. :-)